E537: How Going Into Retail Killed John Terry's Business

Feb 12, 2024

Entrepreneur John Terry shares how going into retail led to the downfall of his CPG business. Topics include challenges with Walmart and Kroger, unrealistic inventory forecasting, financial risks, repositioning a failing business, and navigating insurance claims with public adjusters.

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Introduction

00:00 • 4min

Navigating Walmart Shelves

03:59 • 4min

Navigating Retail Challenges with Walmart and Kroger

07:30 • 18min

Navigating Business Repositioning

25:34 • 12min

Navigating Insurance Claims with Public Adjusters

37:08 • 3min

Navigating Insurance Denials and House Flooding

40:03 • 2min

John Terry joins Mike in today's episode as a follow up from his Under the Hood Episode 417 where he talks about how COVID & the political climate affected his business, and how going into retail ultimately killed his consumer packaged goods (CPG) business.

Today's episode is one that left me absolutely speechless during recording.

It's a hard topic to talk about when listing down a bunch of mistakes, but it's infinitely more difficult to talk about when the list of mistakes eventually lead to the death of your business.

Nevertheless, I commend John for coming on today to talk about how his business ended up this way, the "trap" of going into retail, and advice for those looking to expand into selling in any big box retailer.

Here's some timestamps to help you along:

0:00 - Introduction
2:47 - Podcast Start
3:03 - Under the Hood Overview
4:31 - Meeting with Walmart
7:16 - The Second Mistake
7:48 - Kroger Reaching Out
9:13 - Ordering Inventory for Retail
11:34 - Kroger Privacy Around Logistics
12:35 - Kroger's Costs
13:41 - Backing out from Kroger
14:42 - First Warning
15:10 - Skyrocketing costs
18:27 - Poor performance in Walmart
20:24 - The goal moving forward
21:36 - Buying back inventory from Walmart
22:25 - Why the product failed in retail
25:39 - Where to go from here
28:00 - Mike's advice
32:02 - John's advice to entrepreneurs
37:21 - John's public adjusting business

John, I can't thank you enough for coming on the podcast and sharing all of the painful things you went through. I hope that someone listens to the episode and knows not to get into retail for the prestige of it.

We hope today’s episode was useful to you. If you want to get in touch with John, you can find him at Linkedin or you can check out his company, Crossroads Insurance Recovery. If you want to check out John's previous episode, click here.

If you have any questions or any topics you’d like us to discuss on the podcast, you can now email us directly at support@ecomcrew.com! Also, we would really appreciate it if you would leave us a review on iTunes.

Thanks for listening!